DEV Community

Martin Jablečník
Martin Jablečník

Posted on • Updated on

IT development evolution for last 30 years

This is my a little thoughtful about most usage programming languages for last years and what will come probably in the future.

Before 1990 were C, C++, Objective-C the most popular programing languages but problem was that this languages was too hard to learn and software development was too long.

1990-2000

  • Began to appear other simpler languages with easy syntax and faster development. That was: Visual Basic, Python, Ruby or Java which had goal to make programming more simple with ability to support more platforms with one written code.
  • In these years also were born the everyone's known web technologies: HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP for creating simple web pages.

2000-2010

  • Java was very successful among companies so Microsoft created C# as concurrent for Java in Windows.
  • Also web technologies like PHP and JavaScript started be a very dominant in web development because these languages was only one solution for creating of web pages during 90s years. - But Ruby and Python started creating their web framework solutions (Django and Rails).
  • JavaScript have a great jQuery library and support of AJAX.
  • Apple created iPhone with iOS and started a new era of mobile development following by Google with Android.
  • Facebook created its social network.
  • So now we have a lot of different languages for different platforms (Desktop, Mobile, Web).

2010-2020

  • Web technologies growed up very fastly and JavaScript was rapidly evolved to creating web applications (React, Angular, Vue), Mobile Apps (React Native, Cordova, Ionic), Server side services (next.js, nest.js, nuxt.js, express, etc..) and Desktop applications (Electron).
  • Of course PHP is still here thanks Wordpress or Joomla solutions for creating of web pages but fullstack web developers can use only JavaScript thanks to node.js
  • Of course Microsoft is again developing TypeScript as a better concurrent to JavaScript and Xamarin for multiplatform mobile development.
  • Also Microsoft after failure with Windows Phone is changing its opinions about open source software and now love Linux!! because probably want to entice all developers to close into its Azure cloud solution.
  • And suddenly here are appearing some new languages like: Kotlin, Swift, Dart, Rust and Go as successors for Java, Objective-C, JavaScript or C/C++ with improved properties like: abilities for functional programming, cleaner code, better performance or null safety solution.

What will be in the future?

Now we have a lot of platforms, programming languages, frameworks or development tools for create any possible solution.
Software companies are racing with each other who bring better multiplatform solution:

Between years 2020-2030 will be probably run fight between these all technologies which will be provide better cross-platform support like Java vs C 30 years ago and which will be only solution for only some special things on some platforms.

Because when companies want to create some applications or services. They doesn't want to pay a lot of different developers focused to different platforms (Web browser, Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Android, Wearable or other things)
They want to have a few developers which can create same code for wide range of platforms with one simple technology. And young developers don't want to learn a lot of different languages for different platforms.

This will be very interesting fight because every these technologies support very big companies:

  • JetBrains with Kotlin is very improving Java language,
  • Microsoft with C# is very dominating in the most used of desktop operating systems,
  • Google with Dart/Flutter and Go is dominating in Web browsers and mobile operating systems
  • Javascript/TypeScript with React have a strong community of web developers
  • and Apple is very strong Brand with personal computers and mobile phones.

Finally what will be the best we will see after years but every from these technologies are interesting and can give you some nice solution.

But only developers decide which will be among TOP 10 technologies after next 10 years.
I hope it will be technologies were are the most developers sutisfactioned:
https://2020.stateofjs.com/en-US/technologies/front-end-frameworks/
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-languages-loved

P.S.: This video can be interesting for somebody ;)

Oldest comments (0)